The EU is gearing up for what will be an epic legal battle with the search outfit Google.

Europe's antitrust chief said oshe was looking closely at Google's deals with phone makers and operators, concerned that conditions related to its Android mobile operating system may be restricting competition.

Margrethe Vestager appears to be gearing up to charge Google with anti-competitive behavior, a year after she accused the company of favoring its shopping service in delivering search results at the expense of rivals. Big companies should not try to protect themselves by holding back innovation, she said.

She is examining Google's contracts with phone makers and operators which use the Android.

"Our concern is that, by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers."

In April 2015, the European Commission opened an antitrust investigation into Android which dominates the market in Europe, and there are concerns that Google is abusing that promote its own apps at the expense of competitors, which the company vehemently denies.

Apparently the Commission is reaching out to Google's rivals for more evidence — indicating charges may be being finalised.

Powercolor has kicked off a new worldwide Pimp My Rig competition in search for the slowest rig on the planet Earth.

The competition will have two rounds where users will have to join one community and prove from September 3rd to September 16th that they have the slowest system while the second round will get all the finalists in a head to head competition. The communities include Techpowerup, Hadwareluxx, Hardwareheaven and Chiphell so you will need to choose one of those if you want to be a part of the competition.

As noted earlier, the competition is looking for the slowest piece of hardware or to be precise the lowest score in Futuremark's 3DMark 2003 benchmark. There are some rules for the benchmark and you can check them out here. The second round will be done with a different benchmark that will be announced at a later date.

The first round prizes include AsRock's 990FX Extreme 3 motherboard, AMD FX-8150 CPU, Cooler Master's HAF XM case, QuickFire Rapid keyboard and Sentinel Adv. II mouse. The final winner will be the one with the lowest combined score and will get Powercolor's HD 7990 Devil13 dual-GPU graphics card.

Apple has just announced iOS 6 and there are a few novelties for owners of iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and the next generation iPhone, which is expected this autumn.

The most notable are the maps with turn by turn navigation, with a claim that this has been designed by Apple. Apple is using Tomtom maps, but it offers what looks to be a nice turn by turn navigation with spoken directions and flyover – a chance to see selected cities and landmarks from air and can calculate an alternative route with traffic app. It looks like it has all you need for decent competitor to Google’s navigation.

Siri in iOS6 will speak “sports”. This looks quite interesting as it can tell you American football scores (USA version of it at least), some basic details about players or simply provide info on whether Kobe is taller than LeBron. It will provide statistics such as baseball batting average, albeit in USA-centric sports.

We are not sure if Apple now talks European sports, especially football (we will not call it soccer, forget it. sub.ed.). Apple has until September 2012 to tune into some European sports. Football got mentioned but at this point, Siri speaks English Premier League only.

Siri will be able to tell you about restaurants nearby and it will sort them by rating, type, etc. Furthermore, Apple has partnered with Yelp to provide more info on that sort of stuff. Apple has also integrated support for OpenTable and can now help you book a table directly from iOS 6 and Siri.

It will you about movies playing in your local theater, find movies starring with your favorite actor and even let you see trailers on your Siri devices. Siri will come to the latest iPad, something that many will appreciate. Siri will also launch apps, something that many have anticipated.

Eyesfree is also a new feature where you car will let you use your hands-free button to activate Siri. Apple won’t turn the screen on, it will just let the phone talk to you. In the next twelve months BMW, GM, Mercedes, land rover, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota, Crysler and Honda are expected to include this feature with some of their cars.

Siri will speak English and French for Canada, Spanish Mexico, Italian, Switzerland, Korean, Mandarin for Taiwan, Cantonese Hong Kong and Mandarin and Cantonese for mainland China. .

Apple will have improved Facebook integration and Facetime will work over 3G. Over two thirds of mobile webpage requests are coming from Safari, and now you’ll be able to share tabs from other devices. Precaching webpages in order to read them later will also be possible.

Photo streams will be shared between Apple devices including the likes of iPad, Mac, Apple TV. Naturally, you’ll see them on all of these devices.

It will be possible to store messages in VIP or flagged messages folder and open password protected word documents. Inserting pictures or videos in mail compose window will be made easy and you can refresh the mail list.

Passbook (below) will keep all of your passes in one place. This should unify your store cards, boarding passes and movie tickets.

Overall it looks like a decent update that will hit your iPhone 4, 4S and the new iPad in fall of 2012, let’s say September-ish, just in time for the new iPhone 5.

In an attempt to catch up with Google, Microsoft has redesigned its Bing search engine. As we’ve grown to expect these days, the company included elements from social networking sites such as Facebook.

Microsoft’s online unit has lost more than $6 billion since launching Bing. Naturally, it’s still light years away from challenging Google. In fact, we’d say it’s as close to Google as Google+ is to Facebook.

So, the company is now rolling out a new three column design. Apart from the usual search results on the left, Bing will now feature an instant snapshot column. This feature will display extra information you may find useful.

Bing will now come with a ‘Facebook Friends’ column, enabling users to ask their friends’ advice on search. The search engine will also offer access to users’ contacts on Linkedln, twitter and other social networking sites.

When it comes to search engine usage, Bing stands at 15 percent market share, which isn’t too shabby. However, the ground it gained is attributed to Yahoo’s fall from grace. Google still stands as undisputed king at 66 percent share.

HTC’s financial report claims that the company’s business operations took a hit in Q1 2012 for the second consecutive time.

The company’s consolidated revenues for Q1 2012 stand at $2.29 billion. The gross margin was 25.03 percent, which is a 2.08pp on-quarter drop and 4.22pp on-year drop.

HTC’s CEO Peter Chou attributed the drop to strong iPhone 4S competition in the US. Chou confirmed that the company will launch its LTE and HSPA+ supporting, One-branded smartphones via AT&T and T/Mobile as well as LTE supporting EVO with Sprint Nextel in Q2.

Although the LTE and HSPA+ charge should increase the company’s market share in the US, Chou conceded that it is impossible for HTC to retake the dominant market share it once had there. On the other hand, the company has done quite well in Europe and Asia and expects further growth in these regions, particularly China.

Gaiwnard has started yet another competition that will be open until September 26th where you can win thousand bucks, in case you manage to get the highest 3DMark 11 score.

As you would have guessed, the contest rules are pretty simple and all you have to do is push your Gainward graphics card to get a highest 3DMark 11 score with the Performance preset. As noted, the first prize is US $1000 while the second and thrid best score will win Gainward's Phantom3 GTX 580 and GTX 570 cards.

In addition to this main competition, Gainward is also holding a weekly "Precision" contest where you need a 3DMark score that ends up with numbers of the giveaway card, for example, P6570 or X1570 for the second week Phantom 570 prize. Of course, one winner will be randomly drawn among all registered users with such a score. The prizes for this contest include Phantom 560, 570 and 580 cards one for each for weeks of the contest.

Chaps close to ARM have spawned an interesting thought about Intel's tablet and phone chips. Industry seniors, who want to remain unnamed, said that they need to see Intel shipping more of its chips before they start taking Intel's competition much more seriously.

It takes a lot of effort from demo chip to production and the part where you are supposed to see the design win, based on your actual chip shipping. This part takes many quarters.

Intel is undoubtedly getting better at this game and it has a chance to be the first company to make 22nm mobile and tablet chip, but it still has idle power issues to take care. Its 32nm Atom Z670 is not much of a competitor to current dual core ARM based chips, not to mention that quad core ARM chips are just around the corner.

The same sources reminded us that a few years back it was expected that Symbian can take some 60 percent of market by 2014, and from today’s stand point, Symbian will be almost completely gone by that time.

As of today Intel still has a lot to learn, but judging by some recent hiring, they do have a winning chance in this lucrative market. The fight for the ARM market is between Qualcomm, Nvidia and Texas Instruments, for the most part, and of course Apple will continue to make a lot of Ax chips for its devices.

As China was accused of mounting a five-year hacking operation in which industrial and national secrets were stolen on an unprecedented scale, software giant Microsoft started a contest aimed at turning the tables on hackers. Microsoft's plans, launched at a computer security conference in Las Vegas, include prizes for innovative tactics to foil cyber attacks.

Dubbed the BlueHat Prize, Microsoft will reward research that defends against entire types of cyber attacks. The downside is that the scheme will replace ''bounties'' for those who discover individual computer bugs in Microsoft software.

Redmond hopes that if enough people stick brain power into solving system problems they will make it too hard for hackers to take down systems. We would suspect that anyone who can come up with a system that defeats denial of service attacks should be given a lot of dosh, a knighthood and two week's sex with a celebrity of their choice.

Software giant Microsoft is using US copyright law to disable competing hardware on its Xbox console.

In 2009 Microsoft disabled Datel memory cards. The outfit started an antitrust lawsuit. However now it has become a test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Microsoft has a bit of case law on its side. The 1998 DMCA the movie studios asserted that part of the law to block RealNetworks from distributing DVD-copying software. Sony used it against PlayStation hacker George Hotz and the government also cited the law in its criminal prosecution of a California man for running a business modding Xboxes.

However Microsoft sells its own data cards and it was being undercut by Datel. Microsoft said that its actions were protected by the DMCA, because Datel’s memory cards are circumventing an Xbox memory card authentication sequence.

However the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge argued in a federal court filing that the argument was pants. It claimed that Redmond was using the DMCA to grant it exclusive rights to sell any and all Xbox-360-compatible memory cards, controllers, and headsets.

Microsoft claimed that Datel ripped off Microsoft’s authentication firmware to make its chips work.

Our sources who obviously work with both Intel and AMD have told us a quite incredible story. The first impression of Brazos in the eyes of Intel is a good one.

Intel likes it and views the Brazos platform with respect, sources who would like to remain anonymous confirmed. This is the first time ever that AMD has something that can make Intel run for its money in the mobile market.

AMD has a CPU with decent battery life and it can make life quite hard for Atoms, as Ontario looks like a more than a decent competitor. AMD has better graphics but at the same time when it comes to Zacate part of market, Intel has a better CPU core. Let’s not forget that Sandy Bridge also gets to the Pentium notebook market segment by mid-2011 and is more than ready to compete with Zacate 18W TDP dual-core parts.

We know that most users will again go for Intel, but again this time around it won't be a mistake to buy an AMD netbook, especially in the entry level market, as it will be just enough for your everyday work and it will offer quite good battery life.

We only have to see enough products on the market, as AMD was well know for announcing hundreds of designs (remember Puma) and at the end only a few were actually available. Let’s hope they can do better now, and it all starts at CES January 5th and shipping hopefully shortly after.